Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies

Since its inception, Development Studies has tended to restrict its critical enquiries to nations in the ‘Third World.’ The field’s important studies of labor markets, who circulates within them, and the controversies such issues generate, have hitherto been confined ’lesser developed’ societies. In this important collection, drawing from key texts over the course Tom Brass’s career, these concerns are deftly deployed to examine how these same phenomena affect metropolitan capitalist countries.

The reviews, review essays, and essays collected here examine these issues that are now relevant to metropolitan capitalism, as well as their political and ideological effects and implications

Publication date: July 17, 2018

Acknowledgements ... ix

Introduction: Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies ... 1

Part 1: Reviews

1 Reinventing India? ... 33
2 Saints and Sinners ... 44
3 Seeing Ghosts ... 51
4 Brief Encounters with Class ... 56
5 Interns Interned ... 59
6 Marxist Academics and Liberal Hypocrisy ... 62
7 Backing into the Limelight ... 68
8 A Marxist Defence of Marxist Theory ... 73
9 Houellebecq, Anthropologist? ... 77

Part 2: Review Essays

10 The Struggle of/(over) Post-emancipation Rural Labour (‘At Their Perfect Command’?) ... 85
11 Shifts and Stasis in Development Studies ... 106
12 Zomia, or a Postmodern History of Nowhere ... 140
13 The Populist Drift of Global Labour History ... 157

Part 3: Essays

14 The Sabotage of Anthropology and the Anthropologist as Saboteur ... 181
15 How Agrarian Cooperatives Fail: Lessons from 1970s Peru ... 192
16 Capitalism Bonded Labour in India: Reinterpreting Recent (Re-)Interpretations ... 239
17 The Unsaying of Marxism: Capitalist Accumulation and Unfreedom ... 292
18 Academia as Mode of Seduction, or the Elephant in the Socialist Room ... 312
19 The Industrial Reserve Army: What’s Not to Like? ... 354

Bibliography ... 385
Author Index ... 425
Subject Index ... 433